Tradition, Prizes, Love

Looking back on Class Day and Graduation I realize that they constituted a very strange experience. Class Day was incredibly silly: all the students and professors wearing over-the-top hats, a light speech by Buckley and a pretty ridiculous senior memories video (featuring footage of making out in the stacks, Toads, etc.). On the other hand, the actual commencement itself was a ceremony steeped in the stuffiest of traditions. I would reprint the descriptions of all the various maces that the heads of school carry if they weren’t so tedious. Degrees were presented to the deans of each school in a formulaic, inflexible way. The intonation didn't even change. Students process into old campus accompanied by actual fanfare. Yale seems to swing between one extreme and another: overly silly and unnecessarily stuffy. The moment that brought this all home to me was when Bill T. Jones approached Rick Levin to receive his honorary doctorate. On the way he stopped, spread his arms wide, dipped and performed a pirouette. It was an authentic expression of pure joy and elation, something that I think captures what the attitude of the graduates and spectators ought to be during commencement. The stuffiness of the ceremony had smothered this sort of emotional response. People were dozing off while witnessing these ancient traditions that used to mean something, but now seem to serve no purpose but to act as a sort of empty placeholder for the idea of a grand academic tradition. On the other hand, Class Day was a little too free and unregulated. Obviously, the day serves in some way to allow each class to attempt to differentiate itself from others that have come before through their speakers (both the invited one and the students), the film and even the wacky hats that everyone wears. Unfortunately, the whole thing (excepting perhaps the guest speaker) turns out coming off as indulgent and pointless. I probably wouldn’t mind either of these things if I were a parent of someone directly involved, but it just seems a little idiotic to dedicate an entire day to what amounts to telling inside jokes.

The other thing that struck me about Yale’s graduation was the prevalence of prizes and markers of academic achievement. In one sense, the prizes and things like ‘cum laude’ certainly celebrate and reward students who have labored for four years. On the other, they are capable of shaming those who haven’t worked as hard on academics, but have devoted their energies elsewhere and achieved in other ways. I suppose I wouldn’t find this so offensive if the descriptions of the prizes simply said what they were actually awarded for (i.e. GPA) instead of insisting on using high-flown rhetoric about leadership and moral purpose. Certainly part of this is my own academic insecurity (there’s no way I’ll be graduating with distinction in my major or any sort of ‘laude), but I also think it’s lazy, unfair and myopic for an academic institution to equate excellence in studies with ‘high moral purpose.’

Ended tonight with an interesting conversation with Aaron: the idea of love as an expansion of the singular, first person pronoun, or an expansion/fundamental shift in each subject's unitary narrative.